The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  Mackensen’s troops poked and jabbed for two more days, but without conviction. Kesselring late on Saturday proposed suspending his counteroffensive, and Hitler agreed. “In the end, many hounds will kill even the swiftest hare,” a German staff officer lamented. FISCHFANG had cost Fourteenth Army 5,400 casualties. “It has become very difficult to evacuate the wounded,” the army log noted. “All ambulances, even the armored ones, have been lost, making it necessary to use assault guns and Tiger tanks.” Some units existed only in name: the 65th Infantry Division on February 23 mustered 673 men.

  If the hares had been hurt, so had the hounds. VI Corps casualties also exceeded 5,000. The 45th Division alone counted 400 killed in action since Wednesday. Their scrubs blood-caked, surgeons donned nurses’ summer fatigues instead. In the month since the Anzio landings, 200,000 Axis and Allied troops combined had suffered 40,000 battle and nonbattle casualties, a double decimation that would impose at least a temporary stalemate at the beachhead.

  One more casualty remained to be counted. “Message from Clark,” John Lucas wrote on Tuesday, February 22. “He arrives today with eight generals. What the hell.”

  As Tommys and GIs fought their valiant fight, the delicate issue of what to do with their commander had obsessed the high command. Alexander, who privately told London that Lucas had “proved to be an old woman,” complained that he lacked “the necessary drive and enthusiasm to get things done.” A proposal by Brooke that a British general command VI Corps raised hackles in the Pentagon; Eisenhower, now in London, took a rare moment away from planning OVERLORD to send Marshall an eyes-only warning, then wrote Brooke, “It is absolutely impossible in an Allied force to shift command of any unit from one nationality to another during a period of crisis.” Truscott would make an admirable corps commander, he added, although if necessary Patton could serve at the beachhead for a month.

  Clark still resisted sacking Lucas, arguing that he had “done all he could at Anzio.” But with the battle in the balance, Alexander shrewdly recognized that the Fifth Army commander was “a man whose own ambition was key to his actions.” Complaining that Lucas was “old physically and mentally,” Alexander told Clark: “We may be pushed back into the sea. That would be very bad for both of us—and you would certainly be relieved of your command.” Clark continued to balk at changing commanders in midbattle, but he had hedged his bet by agreeing to Truscott’s appointment as deputy commander, privately telling him on February 18—without informing Lucas—that he would likely take over “in four or five days.”

  Now the moment had come. At midmorning on February 22, Clark and his entourage boarded two patrol boats in Naples. They arrived at the beachhead just as Anzio Annie, a German railway gun with shells the size of a refrigerator, raised several enormous geysers in the harbor. Clark toured the front, dodging desultory panzer fire, then at four P.M. repaired to his command post in the seventeenth-century Borghese Palace. Canadian miners from Gibraltar had carved out rooms beneath the mansion, linking the cellars to an abutting railroad tunnel, rigging lights and ventilators, and installing a rope-pulley elevator. They also converted an ancient Roman well into a septic tank instantly known as “Clark’s Shitter.” A sign on the tiled latrine read, FOR GENERAL OFFICERS ONLY.

  At eight P.M., behind a closed door in Clark’s subterranean office, Lucas took the news like a good soldier. Clark advised that “he could no longer resist the pressure,” Lucas told his diary that night, adding wryly, “And I thought I was winning something of a victory.” He would serve briefly as deputy Fifth Army commander at Caserta, swallowing his bitterness toward Clark and the British, then return home to command a training army in Texas. In a letter to his son, Lucas quoted Sir Walter Scott:

  One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

  Truscott was also summoned to the palace cellars. Despite persistent ailments—nasal polyps, abscessed tooth, raging throat—he had, in effect, served as the VI Corps shadow commander for the past five days; among other innovations, he authorized a gifted young artillery officer, Walter T. “Dutch” Kerwin, Jr., to coordinate every gun at the beachhead so as to better mass fires—setting a brigadier general at Kerwin’s side to ensure that gunners heeded the twenty-six-year-old major. Yet in a voice reduced to a raspy whisper, Truscott now objected to Lucas’s formal ouster as unwarranted and unfair. When Clark said he hoped to avoid wounding Lucas’s pride, Truscott growled, “You can’t relieve a corps commander and not hurt him.” Clark waved away the protest. The decision had “already been made.” Privately, he wondered whether Truscott “in the event of a reversal would prefer to be second in command.”

  The new corps commander returned to his Nettuno villa to have his throat painted yet again with silver nitrate. After a late supper, he sat by a crackling fire past midnight with a bottle of B&W scotch. “My one and only purpose is to serve my country,” he wrote Sarah. “If this command offers a bigger opportunity, I must accept it even though I may feel my own inadequacy.”

  If Clark felt inadequate, he kept the sentiment to himself. A staff officer in the Borghese command post described him as “cool, level, taciturn.” No one wore the mask of command better than Mark Clark. Yet the weight pressed. In his war diary he noted that as of this day Fifth Army had sustained 72,982 casualties since landing at Salerno, a man down every three minutes for more than six months. Now another had fallen, wounded in spirit if not in body. “Bringing Johnny back with me in the morning,” he cabled Gruenther. “May send him direct to Sorrento for rest.” To his daughter, Ann, Clark scribbled a note thanking her for a buoyant V-mail letter. “As you can well imagine, I don’t have much to laugh about these days. I was pleased to hear you express confidence that you had in your dad. I hope that I will never disappoint you.”

  Only in a letter to Renie did his frustrations spill out. The officers and men at Anzio “have done all that could have been expected of them,” he told her. The on-to-Rome carping of armchair generals in London and Washington infuriated him. “It is sheer nonsense for these people to criticize them for not having moved on to Rome. The troops would have been cut off,” he wrote. “It is no use arguing. We will let history take care of that.”

  Prodded by Hitler, Kesselring and Mackensen would attack again on February 29, this time against the Allied right. The usual singing, shouting gray-green swarms advanced across the polders only to be flattened by 66,000 Allied artillery shells in a single day; German casualties topped 3,500, for no gain. When Alexander asked General O’Daniel how much ground his 3rd Division had lost to the counterattackers, Iron Mike replied, “Not a goddamned inch, sir.”

  Truscott pinned a Bill Mauldin cartoon over his desk, with one shabby GI telling another, “Th’ hell this ain’t th’ most important hole in th’ world. I’m in it.” His jaw jutting, Truscott told reporters, “We’re going to have a tough time here for months to come. But, gentlemen, we’re going to hold this beachhead come what may.”

  Still, February was sobering for the Allies. For the Americans it would be the bloodiest month in the Mediterranean to date, with nineteen hundred dead. There would be no quick, decisive success via the beachhead flank. Alexander believed the battles at Anzio and Cassino had revealed alarming Allied weakness and German strength. “He is quicker than we are,” he wrote Clark, “quicker at re-grouping his forces, quicker at thinning out a defensive front to provide troops to close gaps at decisive points…quicker at reaching decisions on the battlefield. By comparison, our methods are often slow and cumbersome.”

  This was true enough, but it was not the whole truth. The greater revelation was of Allied strength and German weakness. “Without air support,” a German staff officer complained, “all planning was an illusion.” Lieutenant General Ira C. Eaker, the senior American airman in the Medit
erranean, concurred. “In the air in Italy,” Eaker wrote, “the Hun is absolutely flat on his back.” If less prostrate, German artillery had proved another deficiency, particularly because of ammunition shortages. VI Corps fired 158,000 rounds during FISCHFANG, a ten-to-one advantage over German gunners. American artillery, singularly good since the Mexican War, kept getting better, aided by aerial spotting, the profusion of radios, nimble fire control, and those murderous queens offshore. Truscott soon demanded, and got, counterbattery fire in four minutes, less than half the time previously required. A single 105mm howitzer shooting every thirty seconds could, in one hour, seed 43,000 square yards with two tons of lethal steel fragments. Allied artillery inflicted three-quarters of all German battle casualties at Anzio.

  The failure to exterminate the Allied beachhead carried sober implications beyond southern Italy, and even Kesselring’s optimism dimmed. Not only were German forces overmatched in the air and outgunned on the ground, but “a perceptible weakening of the daredevil spirit” afflicted the ranks, he told a visiting general from Berlin in late February. This, he believed, was “the last year of the war.” By the calculation of Kesselring’s chief of staff, General Siegfried Westphal, more combat matériel had been brought to play in FISCHFANG than on any German battlefield since 1940, with the exception of Sevastopol, and the grim result revealed the “progressive exhaustion of the army after more than 41/2 years of fighting,” Westphal said. “The blanket had become too thin and too short.”

  Believing that the high command must hear that “a turning point had been reached in the war,” Kesselring sent Westphal to deliver this revelation in a three-hour meeting with the Führer and his military brain trust at the Berchtesgaden retreat. “Hitler was very calm,” Westphal reported, and he approved Fourteenth Army’s shift to the defensive at Anzio. Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, the Wehrmacht chief, voiced surprise that Hitler had listened to “so many unpleasant things.” Upon returning to Italy, Westphal told Kesselring that “the Führer appeared bowed down with care.”

  Such strategic nuances were beyond the ken of those consigned to the beachhead for the duration. German engineers trucked in forced-labor Italian carpenters from Rome—including movie set craftsmen from Cinecittà, the studio complex built by Mussolini—to fashion decoy panzers and gun tubes, as well as other military illusions in the Colli Laziali. In Allied camps, the departure of General Lucas stirred little sentiment beyond the hope, as one British gunner later put it, that his “successor would soon get us out of the mess we were in.” Most licked their wounds, of body and soul, and steeled themselves for battles still ahead. “I’m a little tired,” an Irish Guards sergeant confessed after emerging from the hellish Moletta gullies. “But then, I’m an old man now.”

  “Man Is Distinguished from the Beasts”

  AS FISCHFANG played out at Anzio, another crowded hour ticked away for Monte Cassino and the armies encircling the abbey. Freyberg the New Zealander had become ever more insistent on obliterating the building before launching an attack, and his bellicosity was soon to be inflamed by word that his only child, a young officer in the Grenadier Guards, had gone missing at Anzio. A Royal Artillery gunner said of the looming white edifice, “Somehow it was the thing that was holding up all our lives and keeping us away from home. It became identified in an obsessional way with all the things we detested.”

  Willy-nilly bombing of priceless cultural icons was discouraged by custom and forbidden by law. Months earlier the Combined Chiefs had reminded Eisenhower that “consistent with military necessity, the position of the church and of all religious institutions shall be respected and all efforts made to preserve the local archives, historical and classical monuments, and objects of art.” Eisenhower in turn warned his lieutenants in late December that “military necessity” should not be abused as an expedient for military convenience. Alexander’s headquarters in mid-January identified the Monte Cassino abbey and the papal estate at Castel Gandolfo as two preeminent “eccelesiastical centres which it is desired to preserve.” An Allied pamphlet, titled “Preservation of Works of Art in Italy,” included a section headed “Why Is Italy So Rich in Works of Art?” and the assertion that “man is distinguished from the beasts by his power to reason and to frame abstract hopes and ideas.” Bomber-crew briefing packets included street maps, copied from Baedeker guidebooks, that highlighted historic buildings to avoid. Allied staff officers assigned to repair inadvertent damage were known as Venus Fixers.

  Already the Venus Fixers had been busy. Bombs had damaged forty churches in Naples alone; the magnificent bronze doors on a cathedral north of the city were reduced to particles. Errant bombs hit Castel Gandolfo several times in early February, and one such misadventure killed seventeen nuns. But deliberate destruction of Monte Cassino would escalate this “war in a museum,” as Kesselring called the Italian campaign, and within Allied war councils arguments for and against were marshaled with warm intensity.

  The unit ordered to capture the massif, the 4th Indian Division, remained keenest to “drench” the hill with bombs. A dubious report from a captured German prisoner, who claimed that paratroopers had put a command post and an aid station within the abbey, led the 4th Indian on February 12 to publish an intelligence summary titled “Violation of Geneva Convention.” Other imagined sightings included those by an Italian civilian who reported thirty machine guns, a 34th Division colonel who saw the flash of field glasses in an abbey window, and U.S. gunners who swore that hostile small-arms fire had streamed from the building. A British newspaper on February 11 printed the incendiary headline “Nazis Turn Monastery into Fort.”

  On February 14, two senior American generals, Ira Eaker and Jacob Devers, flew in an observation phase at fifteen hundred feet over Monte Cassino and reported seeing “Germans in the courtyard and also their antennas,” as well as a machine-gun nest fifty yards from the abbey wall. Another American airman, Major General John K. Cannon, pledged, “If you let me use the whole of our bomber force against Cassino, we will whip it out like a dead tooth.” An American artillery commander told The New York Times, “I have Catholic gunners in this battery and they’ve asked me for permission to fire on the monastery.” Indeed, the wolf had risen in the heart. A U.S. air wing intelligence analysis declared on February 14, “This monastery has accounted for the lives of upwards of 2,000 boys…. This monastery must be destroyed and everyone in it, as there is no one in it but Germans.”

  Others passionately disagreed. The French commander, General Juin, pleaded with Clark to spare the building. General Keyes, also a devout Catholic, took his own plane above the abbey on the morning of February 14 and saw “no signs of activity.” Bombing the building would be “an unnecessary outrage,” he told his diary, particularly because II Corps intelligence detected as many as two thousand refugees now sheltering inside. Moreover, “a partially destroyed edifice is much better for defensive purposes than an untouched one.” Keyes’s irritation at Freyberg grew so intense that Clark rebuked him for “your somewhat belligerent attitude”; the men exchanged peace offerings, with Keyes sending a package of butter, catsup, and Nescafé, and Spadger reciprocating with New Zealand lambs’ tongue, canned oysters, and honey. Still fuming, Keyes wrote, “Why we Americans have to kowtow to the British and by order of our American commanders is beyond me.”

  Freyberg was not to be denied, and with Clark at the beachhead he pressed Gruenther for a decision, even though he put the odds of capturing the massif after a bombardment at no better than “fifty-fifty.” If Clark refused to destroy the building, Freyberg added darkly, he would “have to take the responsibility” for New Zealand Corps casualties. Alexander’s new chief of staff, Lieutenant General John H. Harding, also pressured Gruenther. “General Alexander has made his position quite clear,” Harding said in a phone call. “He regrets very much that the monastery should be destroyed, but he sees no other choice.” General Alex “has faith in General Freyberg’s judgment.”

  Clark had no
such faith. “I now have five corps under my command, only two of which are American, all others of different nationalities,” he wrote in his diary. “I think Napoleon was right when he came to the conclusion that it was better to fight allies than to be one of them.” But he sensed that yet another die had been cast. In a phone call from Alexander, Clark made a last effort to forestall the attack. No clear evidence placed Germans in the abbey. “Previous efforts to bomb a building or a town to prevent its use by the Germans…always failed,” he added. “It would be shameful to destroy the abbey and its treasure,” not to mention any innocent civilians inside. “If the Germans are not in the monastery now, they certainly will be in the rubble after the bombing ends,” Clark said.

  Alexander conceded the points, then shrugged them off. “Bricks and mortar, no matter how venerable, cannot be allowed to weigh against human lives,” he argued. Freyberg was “a very important cog in the commonwealth effort. I would be most reluctant to take responsibility for his failing and for his telling his people, ‘I lost five thousand New Zealanders because they wouldn’t let me use air as I wanted.’” Not least, Alexander felt scalding pressure from London. “What are you doing sitting down doing nothing?” the prime minister demanded in a preposterous cable. “Why don’t you use your armour in a great scythe-like movement through the mountains?”

  Clark capitulated. If Freyberg were American, he told Alexander, he would deny the request. But “due to the political daintiness” of the circumstances—Spadger in effect commanded a small national army—there was little choice but to procede with the plan now code-named Operation AVENGER. In a dictated memo, Clark condemned Alexander for “unduly interfering with Fifth Army activities,” adding, “It is too bad unnecessarily to destroy one of the art treasures of the world.”